- The picture below (from the New York Times) speaks most
eloquently on the essence of the Bush Regime's brutal, grubby Babylonian
Conquest: fat mercenaries guarding the construction of yet another prison.
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- The picture comes from a story on the "overhead
costs" of reconstruction projects, based on a report by the Special
Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who found astonishing amounts
of waste and cost overruns by the crony contractors who came to feast on
the carcass that Bush killed for them. Two main points emerge from the
report.
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- First, that the IG's catalogue of gouging, feather-bedding
and other profitable forms of war-profiteering is by no means complete,
because "the United States has not properly tracked how much such
expenses have taken from the $18.4 billion of taxpayer-financed reconstruction
approved by Congress two years ago." In fact, the IG's office was
only able to examine $1.3 billion of the contracts.
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- In other words, as oft reported here (and here and here),
much of that money has simply disappeared -- into corporate coffers, into
copious baksheesh for the Bush-backed Iraqi government, into kickbacks
for Congressional vultures, and doubtless into slush funds both for covert
ops (including perhaps the Bushists' deliberate fomenting of terrorism
and arming of militias) and domestic politics. We are most likely seeing
the fruits of some of this blood money wash up on American screens at this
very moment, as the GOP's last-ditch "Smear and Fear" campaign
goes into hyperdrive.
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- The second salient point is the fact that most of this
"overhead" is not going toward security costs. Apologists for
the Dear Leader's war crime have been quick to answer any criticism of
the woeful dearth of "reconstruction" -- and the fact that the
Iraqi people now have lower levels of electricity, fuel, health care, sanitation,
etc. than before the invasion -- by blaming the colossal waste and fraud
on the insurgents. But the Inspector General -- appointed by the Bush Administration
itself -- tells us that the war-crime apologists are dead wrong:
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- The report said the prime reason was not the need to
provide security, though those costs have clearly risen in the perilous
environment, and are a burden that both contractors and American officials
routinely blame for such increases. Instead, the inspector general pointed
to a simple bureaucratic flaw: the United States ordered the contractors
and their equipment to Iraq and then let them sit idle for months at a
time. The delay between "mobilization," or assembling the teams
in Iraq, and the start of actual construction was as long as nine months.
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- "The government blew the whistle for these guys
to go to Iraq and the meter ran," said Jim Mitchell, a spokesman for
the inspector general's office. "The government was billed for sometimes
nine months before work began."
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- The findings are similar to those of a growing list of
inspections, audits and investigations that have concluded that the program
to rebuild Iraq has often fallen short for the most mundane of reasons:
poorly written contracts, ineffective or nonexistent oversight, needless
project delays and egregiously poor construction practices.
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- "This report is the latest chapter in a long, sad
and expensive tale about how contracting in Iraq was more about shoveling
money out the door than actually getting real results on the ground,"
said Stephen Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington.
"These contracts were to design and build important items for oil
infrastructure, hospitals and education, but in some cases more than half
of the money padded corporate coffers instead," he said.None of this
is surprising. War profiteering by favored corporate cronies was one of
the primary benefits envisaged by the Bush Regime as it drove so relentlessly
and deceitfully toward the baseless and unprovoked attack. This "waste"
and "overhead" was and is a key part of the whole operation.
Certainly, the betterment of Iraqi lives was far down the list of priorities
for the "reconstruction" program. As we noted here last week,
the whole war has been a cash cow that will swell the personal fortunes
and fuel the partisan agenda of the Bush Faction players, even if they
are turfed out of office in 2008. Thus it was inevitable that the $18 billion
boondoggle would produce results like this:
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- The report provided the first official estimate that,
in some cases, more money was being spent on housing and feeding employees,
completing paperwork and providing security than on actual construction.
Those overhead costs have ranged from under 20 percent to as much as 55
percent of the budgets, according to the report.... On similar projects
in the United States, those costs generally run to a few percent.
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- The highest proportion of overhead was incurred in oil-facility
contracts won by KBR Inc., the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as
Kellogg Brown & Root, which has frequently been challenged by critics
in Congress and elsewhere.The latter finding on KBR is "news"
on the order of "sun rises in the east" or "pigs eat swill."
In fact, Halliburton's unconscionable gulping of blood money -- and the
fact that Dick Cheney still receives huge annual sums from the company
-- are so well-established now that they pass almost unnoticed. "Halliburton,
Cheney, yeah, everybody knows that. Even Leno's stopped telling jokes about
it." This stark corruption -- an unprecedented scandal in American
history: a sitting vice-president openly taking cash from a war industry
during a war of which he himself is a prime instigator -- has almost lost
its power to shock.
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- (Of course, KBR played a very similar role during the
Vietnam War, when huge wads of its massive war profits were certainly kicked
back to serving politicians like Lyndon Johnson and others in the then-Democratic
majority, as well as to key Republicans. But in those days, bought pols
had the decency to trouser their bribes on the QT, not serve openly on
the payroll. Here, as in so many things, the Bush Regime is openly embracing
-- and often codifying in law -- dark practices once thought shameful to
acknowledge. I suppose we must at least admire their refreshing candor
in being so forthrightly corrupt, bloodthirsty and belligerent.)
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- The IG's report is devastating: but again, all this waste
was built into the system from the start. Halliburton and the other swill-swallowers
were given "cost-plus" contracts (many of them simply handed
out like Halloween candy, without any of that silly-billy nonsense about
competitive bidding). This means that they are guaranteed a certain set
profit, no matter how far their costs balloon. There is simply no incentive
for them to even try to bring a project in at cost -- or indeed, to even
complete it at all. There's just too money to be made by running up the
meter, throwing away material and buying it again, cutting lucrative side
deals with suppliers (and re-suppliers), mercenaries, local officials,
etc.
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- This ethos of waste, corruption and utter disregard for
the money of the American people -- and the lives and well-being of the
Iraqi people -- is characteristic of the entire malevolent enterprise.
A war of aggression launched without any justification whatsoever beyond
the greed and power-lust of a band of corrupt authoritarian militarists
-- led by two men who squirmed and weaseled mightily to avoid combat in
their youths but have no compunction whatsoever about sending other people
off to kill and die -- was bound to produce the moral horror that we see
in Iraq today. And make no mistake -- despite all the White House PR about
"timetables" and strategy shifts, despite the rising hopes of
ousting Bush's bootlicking rubberstamps from control of the Congress, the
stark truth (which I noted here in May) remains: There is no good solution
to the hell Bush has wrought in his arrogance and folly. There is only
blood and horror all the way down.
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- Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared
in print and online in venues all over the world, including the Nation,
CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor,
Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire
Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder
and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. He can be
reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
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